Rio Conchos opens with a rather shocking scene of a white man shooting a couple of Indians from a distance in cold blood.‭ ‬What makes the scene even more uncomfortable,‭ ‬is the fact that the victims were burying one of their own.‭

The shooter is Jim Lassiter‭ (‬Richard Boone‭) ‬an ex-Confederate officer who has turned into an Apache killer after ‬the tribe has tortured his wife and children to death.‭ ‬He’s arrested by the U.S.‭ ‬Army because he’s in possession of a rifle that is part of a cache of U.S.‭ ‬Army rifles,‭ ‬stolen by a group of southern renegades,‭ ‬led by a man called Pardee.‭ ‬The renegades are now living south of the border and Pardee has planned to continue his war against the Union by arming the Apaches.‭ ‬Lassiter is offered a chance to regain his freedom if he’s willing to lead an illegal s…

John
Sturges was a combat-documentarist during WWII and the experience served him
well in a post-war Hollywood, where he became known as a very solid director of
taut, suspenseful action movies, many of them westerns. Two of these westerns
belong to the most popular in history, Gunfight
at the OK Corral (1957) and the Kurosawa adaptation The Magnificent Seven (1960). They're fine movies, but many western fans (and I'm one of them) prefer some of his
'smaller' efforts, such as the Freudian noir-western Backlash (1956), the taut
cavalry versus Indians drama Escape from
Fort Bravo (1953) or the movie discussed here, The Law and Jake Wade. It's often
said that Sturges was only as good as the scripts he had to work with, but The
Law and Jake Wade shows that he could make a (very) good western out of decent,
but otherwise unexceptional story material.Robert Taylor is Jake Wade, a reformed outlaw, now a town Marshall. His
personal code of honor tells him to save the life o…